When you walk into SinglePlatform's office, you'll see customer testimonials lining the walls, inspirational quotes and artwork chalked onto a pillar painted with chalkboard paint, and Lego blocks towering over the desks of sales staff, each piece to indicate a goal that was met. The walls are plastered with printouts of customer testimonials praising the company for great service. In the hall, an employee takes three swings at a Wiffle ball in attempt to garner a ticket in the raffle.

But company culture is not just fun and games. For a sales-drive company like SinglePlatform, celebrating wins both small and large is central to culture. For product-driven TechStars company weeSpring, which has barely hired outside of its three founders, culture is a codified set of values that drives both recruiting and site design.

What is the result of investing in culture?

"Our applicant pool is off the charts. We're accepting 1.2% of the applicants that we screen," Dane Atkinson, founder of SumAll, says. "We have no churn. We have a team that's willing to sacrifice more than most teams, so the salary discounts are way higher."

So, when justifying an investment in culture, don't look for a direct ROI. Think about the extra costs you'll incur from a lack of culture. To learn more about best practices, Mashable spoke with startup founders known for instilling strong culture for tips on how culture is built at every stage of growth.

1. Document Your Values

When weeSpring was in TechStars, they had what founder Allyson Downey calls a "family therapy" session with well-known investor Brad Feld.

"Everyone on your team should go sit alone and for 15 minutes and write down [your company values] on a piece of paper," Downey remembers Feld saying, "because if you just start it as a live conversation, the extroverts win and the introverts don't jump in and you don't hear from everybody."

The first value the team agreed upon was "not pink," and as a social website for parents, this was a design principle as much as an organizational principle. Other values include "keep it simple," "quality is better than quantity" and "honesty."

TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie remembers a time when everyone at TOMS would say there was a "TOMS way of doing things," but with company growth, only the original 100 out of 400 employees now know what that means. This summer he's inviting employees to nominate each other or themselves to be on a committee that will rewrite the company's mission, vision and values. "Every morning for two weeks from 7 to 9, early so people have to be committed," Mycoskie says.

Jessica Herrin, founder of distributed jewelry sales company Stella & Dot, says she started with a company manifesto that has not changed. Kindness, supporting each other and believing in people are included.

2. Hire Well

Stella & Dot's culture starts with hiring the right people. There are 10 hiring filters — including sense of urgency, curiosity and willingness to fail — that make sure new hires are a cultural fit. After prioritizing this cultural fit, "excellent functional skill set is last," Herrin says.

"Shaping your culture is more than half done when you hire your team," she says.

For Wiley Cerilli's sales team at SinglePlatform, he's discovered a few shortcuts to get the right people hired.

"It's pretty obvious to us whether someones going to be the right fit for our culture just as how often the word "I" comes up in your interview with them, versus how often they talk about their team and how many team members' names come up," Cerilli says.

And no matter how well your values are set and hiring process is designed, allow yourself a little grace to learn from mistakes.

If you're going fast and hiring fast, you're never going to be 100% right, Herrin says.

3. Evolve With Growth

The earlier culture is set, the better. Atkinson of SumAll says that the stage weeSpring is at, with fewer than 10 employees, is ideal. With between 20 and 50 employees, a founder still has direct control, but with up to 90 employees, you can't directly influence every person in the organization, but you're also not quite to the point that you've hired great leaders to do this work for you.

"Your team should form its DNA early," Atkinson says.

The summer culture project of TOMS came about after the company hired a chief people officer — who was previously in HR at Starbucks and was responsible for integrating acquired companies into Starbucks culture.

But if growth means gaining talent, it might also mean letting some go.

While Mycoskie says everyone on the original TOMS team (working in his apartment, then a bigger apartment and then a warehouse) is still with the company, it's not often the case. "Early employees were egoless in a sense," he says, "they were like, maybe I don't have the senior leadership title or position anymore but I'm so committed to the life of this company and what we're trying to do." Mycoskie himself hired a president to run the business and took the title "chief shoe giver" for himself.

At weeSpring, Downey says she tells recruits upfront that growth means hiring above the early employees.

Atkinson put job titles aside completely, and gives early employees a virtual portfolio of duties, say, various marketing roles, and as people are hired the early employee can unload duties that are further out of expertise — so they're not burnt by the process.

"Employees don't always grow with company," Cerilli says. "The jacks of all trades can often not scale with the business which is really, really difficult."

4. Set The Environment

If culture is half set once your team is hired, there's still a second half to address. Cerilli considers it his responsibility to engineer the environment his team will work in, invoking a popular Brad Feld quote (written about in this blog post):

"You can’t motivate people, you can only create a context in which people are motivated."

So, that's where the Legos and chalkboard quotes come from. But how his company communicates is also part of SinglePlatform's culture. A weekly email that recognizes people now includes photos; in his company's current phase, not everyone knows everyone's name anymore.

"Celebrating teams wins is such a basic thing that every CEO can do," Cerilli says.

And what constitutes a win? Cerilli notes founders can get caught up in things like the next funding they need to raise, but meanwhile, celebrating the short term goals is overlooked.

"You don't want these unrealistic goals. You want to set goals that you can hit, so when you start hitting them, you can celebrate those wins. People start trusting in your way of projecting the business," he explains.

Deciding which "wins" to celebrate, it would seem, has less to do with what your team accomplishes and more to do with setting employees up for success from the beginning — this, as much as the physical Lego towers on desks, is the environment you're creating.

5. Be Transparent

There's a quote: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea...." It's something Cerilli says he applies to his business.

"People want to know where the company is going," he says.

Atkinson, as well, sees ownership as a key part of what constitutes culture.

"Culture is creating an environment in which your team members are owners of the process, so they're dedicated to the team in a different fashion," Atkinson says.

But for many startups, employees are owners — literally. They're given a cut of company stock, although Atkinson says not enough of them are asking how much that is. The number of shares doesn't mean much unless you also know the total number of shares and how a future round of financing will impact it.

This is where transparency comes into play.

At SumAll, the salaries are open to everyone to see. So is ownership. Board meetings are held in front of the whole company.

"All that stuff is meant to make a more trusted environment where you don't feel like you're getting screwed over," Atkinson says. "It's really hard to screw people over when you're an open book."

SumAll is not alone. At Buffer, not only are salaries open, but founder Joel Gascoigneopened his formula for determining each salary. The idea is to remove that incentive to always be asking for more (because who knows what the others are making). And Atkinson says he's learned the hard way, by leaving papers in a printer or an accountant spilling the beans, that there are insecurities around how much people earn.

So opening the sensitive information for all to see enables the disgruntlement to be open as well — and then resolved.

Put another way, "culture beats strategy every time," Cerilli says.

Since SinglePlatform was acquired, it hasn't lost any developers or executives — Cerilli points out that the new owner, Constant Contact, has values that match those of SinglePlatform.

"It's not just because we're doing well," Cerilli says. "We've been doing these things since we've started. It's just one of those things you can't really appreciate until you start doing it, and then you realize, wow, there's an enormous benefit."

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